Improving computer program readability to aid modification

Elshoff, James L.; Marcotty, Michael

doi:10.1145/358589.358596

Cited by 47 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Especially, they are crucial to sustain software maintainability and aid in reverse engineering, for example when applying the Read All the Code in One Hour reengineering pattern [5]. Elshoff and Marcotty already stated in the early eighties that comments as well as the structure of the source code aid in program understanding and therefore reduce maintenance costs [6]. This finding was confirmed by the studies of Ted Tenny [19].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 87%

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Do Code and Comments Co-Evolve? On the Relation between Source Code and Comment Changes

Fluri

Würsch

Gall

2007

14th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2007)

174

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Comments are valuable especially for program understanding and maintenance, but do developers comment their code? To which extent do they add comments or adapt them when they evolve the code? We examine the question whether source code and associated comments are really changed together along the evolutionary history of a software system. In this paper, we describe an approach to map code and comments to observe their co-evolution over multiple versions. We investigated three open source systems (i.e., ArgoUML, Azureus, and JDT Core) and describe how comments and code co-evolved over time. Some of our findings show that: 1) newly added code|despite its growth rate|barely gets commented; 2) class and method declarations are commented most frequently but far less, for example, method calls; and 3) that 97% of comment changes are done in the same revision as the associated source code change.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…All three projects are written in Java and are version-controlled using CVS. 6 The dimensions of the projects are summarized in Table 1. The number of Java classes (NOC) and the number of lines of code (LOC) are given for the first and last major releases.…”

Section: Case Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Code and Comments Co-Evolve? On the Relation between Source Code and Comment Changes

Fluri

Würsch

Gall

2007

14th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2007)

174

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“…A consensus exists that readability is an essential determining characteristic of code quality [1,5,10,11,19,29,34,35,36,37,38,44], but not about which factors most contribute to human notions of software readability. A previous study by Tenny looked at readability by testing comprehension of several versions of a program [42].…”

Section: Human Readability Annotationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furthermore, maintaining software often means evolving software, and modifying existing code is a large part of modern software engineering [35]. Readability is so significant, in fact, that Elshoff and Marcotty proposed adding a development phase in which the program is made more readable [11]. Knight and Myers suggested that one phase of software inspection should be a check of the source code for readability [26].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A metric for software readability

Buse

Weimer

2008

Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

118

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In this paper, we explore the concept of code readability and investigate its relation to software quality. With data collected from human annotators, we derive associations between a simple set of local code features and human notions of readability. Using those features, we construct an automated readability measure and show that it can be 80% effective, and better than a human on average, at predicting readability judgments. Furthermore, we show that this metric correlates strongly with two traditional measures of software quality, code changes and defect reports. Finally, we discuss the implications of this study on programming language design and engineering practice. For example, our data suggests that comments, in of themselves, are less important than simple blank lines to local judgments of readability.

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“…Because of its importance in the development process, several scholars in the software engineering field have focused their efforts on improving code readability [Elshoff & Marcotty, 1982], extracting information from comments with the purpose of determining what makes an annotation useful [Khamis et al, 2010] and developing techniques to automatically annotate source code [Buse & Weimer, 2010]. In addition, metrics for software quality analysis have been proposed to assess the value of source code comments and annotations [Khamis et al, 2010;Schreck et al, 2007].…”

Section: Annotations In Software Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Annotation Mechanisms to Manage Design Knowledge in Complex Parametric Models and Their Effects on Alteration and Reusability

Camba¹

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSI would like to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation to my advisor, Professor Dr. Manuel Contero, for his expert guidance, support, and valuable suggestions and critiques to this work. Thank you for accepting me as your PhD student and giving me the opportunity to work with you. I honestly could not have asked for a better advisor.I also thank my family for their love, patience, and support throughout this process and for letting me steal their valuable time to work on this dissertation. It is my hope that their sacrifice has finally paid off. ABSTRACTDespite the evolution of technologies intended to facilitate and optimize product development processes and foster collaboration, effective reuse of 3D models remains one of the biggest challenges in the area of ComputerAided Design. Whether a manufacturer is designing a new commercial aircraft or a household appliance, engineering teams often start with existing designs and adapt them to new cases, rather than designing every product from scratch. Nevertheless, CAD model reuse is not effectively supported by conventional CAD packages, as much of the burden related to reusability lies on the CAD user.It has been shown that CAD model reusability largely depends on a proper definition and communication of the geometric design intent, which are usually expressed implicitly within the CAD model. This implicit representation makes it difficult for CAD users interacting with a CAD model to understand how and why the model was created in a specific manner. This is especially true for models being reworked by designers that are not the original creators of the models. The inability to understand and modify existing CAD models negatively affects reusability and hinders the collaborative design process. The problem becomes more relevant in modelbased engineering environments, where 3D models are used as the main shared data source for all engineering activities throughout the product life cycle.Recent research has explored the potential of 3D annotations as tools to carry design intent information. The focus of this doctoral research is to study the effectiveness of 3D CAD annotation techniques to support the explicit representation and communication of design intent, and to analyze the impact of these techniques in the alteration and reutilization of 3D models in a product design context. Literature shows that a good and structured methodology is an essential step to create parametric models that are reusable and can be altered easily. However, when models reach a certain level of complexity in terms of number of features and interdependencies, additional mechanisms must be established so design intent can be communicated effectively in an explicit manner. In this regard, a comparative study was conducted to determine the complexity of three professionally accepted modeling methodologies. These methodologies represent a group of well tested and documented methodologies that are currently available to the public. An efficient 5 modeling methodology c...

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Improving computer program readability to aid modification

Cited by 47 publications

References 10 publications

Do Code and Comments Co-Evolve? On the Relation between Source Code and Comment Changes

Do Code and Comments Co-Evolve? On the Relation between Source Code and Comment Changes

A metric for software readability

Annotation Mechanisms to Manage Design Knowledge in Complex Parametric Models and Their Effects on Alteration and Reusability

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